Good Life Project - Jocelyn Glei: Unsubscribing as an Act of Creation.

Episode Date: October 6, 2016

Jocelyn Glei knows how to get the right stuff done. The founding editor and a key member of the team that built the massive 99u community, website and conference and the Behance platform for creative professionals, she’s a brilliant thinker in the realm of focused creation, with a track record to back up her ideas. […]The post Jocelyn Glei: Unsubscribing as an Act of Creation. appeared first on Good LifeProject. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hey, it's Jonathan. I have a quick question for you. Have you downloaded the first chapter of my new book yet? It's totally and completely free. You don't even need to drop an email to get it. And it's actually called How to Live a Good Life, Soulful Stories, Surprising Science, and Practical Wisdom. And it's pretty different, I think at least, than a lot of books that you'll find out there on a similar topic. But as I tend to do with pretty much everything, I have no desire to ask you to believe me with that. You can check it out for yourself. Go ahead and download the first chapter entirely for free. You don't need an email, nothing. Just go and read it and see if it feels right to you. You can do that at goodlifeproject.com slash book,

or just go ahead and click the link in the show notes now. Thanks so much on tour show. Hey, it's Jonathan with A Good Life Project Riff, and this week is going to be a guest riff. So I've known this week's riffer for a number of years. Her name is Jocelyn Gley, and she headed up, along with Scott Belsky, an organization called Behance and then since moved on and is really doing her own gig and building an amazing audience. And she's an incredible writer and thinker. And she's been focusing a lot on distractions and how to actually get stuff done and email and anxiety and things like that. She has a new book out actually called Unsubscribe, How to Kill Email Anxiety, Avoid Distractions, and Get Real Work Done. And you can pretty much find that anywhere books are available. And so I asked her if she would actually take over the mic for this week's Good Life Project riff and talk a bit about how

we can actually reclaim our focus and start paying attention to what matters more. So I'm turning it over to Jocelyn. Enjoy. I will see you again next week. We're living in what I like to call the age of distraction. And what I mean by that is we're experiencing an unprecedented level of strain on our attention. If you just think about how many apps you use in a given day, or how many browser tabs you have open, or how many messages, alerts, and notifications you process in a single day, it's kind of insane. And the challenge of living in the age of distraction is that it's incredibly easy to be busy, but it's incredibly difficult to be deliberate, to be focused. And of course, you can't actually produce anything of

value without focus. And this is why distraction and living in our current state of technology saturation is so difficult for creative people in particular, I think. Because when you're talking about creating anything great, whether it's writing a novel or launching a startup or making incredible art, distraction is really a double-edged sword. When it comes to pursuing breakthrough ideas, it's really both our greatest strength and our greatest weakness. And that's part of what makes it so challenging to navigate. So let's start with how distraction can be good.

A really interesting study came out of Northwestern University a few months ago that confirmed something really important. And it's also something that most of us probably already know intuitively, which is that creative people are sensitive. And I don't mean that creatives are moody, though, of course, they most certainly are. I mean, sensitive quite literally. Creatives have what scientists call poor sensory gating, which basically means that we have a reduced ability to filter out irrelevant sensory information. Like you can't stop listening to the job interview that's

happening next to you when you're trying to work at a coffee shop, or maybe you're at a restaurant and you hear a familiar strain of music in the background and you can't concentrate on the conversation that you're having while you try to place it. Basically, it means that it's very hard for creatives to tune out what's happening around us. We have what scientists call, quote unquote, leaky attention. Even when we're trying to focus, our minds are always a little bit open. It's like we have these sort of antennae that are constantly probing the environment around us. In other words, we're extremely distractible. But so why is this a strength and a weakness? Well,

distraction is a double-edged sword because creativity is really made up of two distinct components. If you think about that classic Thomas Edison quotation that genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration, creativity has two components. One is inspiration or idea generation, and the second is perspiration or idea execution. And our ability to be distracted is amazing when we're engaging with the 1% part of the creative process, right? When we're gathering information or concepting, trying to connect concepts in new ways or generating ideas, then we really excel and that ability to be distracted is helpful. But our facility for being distracted is a huge drawback when it comes to the 99% part of the creative process, the execution.

And yet we're now surrounded by technologies and devices that function exactly like little engines of distraction. Email, text messaging, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Slack, Snapchat, the list goes on and on. We live amidst these apps and technologies that are constantly trying to distract us and to steal our attention away from our most important work. So it's incredibly easy to be busy, but it's incredibly difficult to stay focused. So what do we do as creative people who are living in a world that seems increasingly designed to sabotage the focus necessary to produce any work of value. Well, I think that we really need to figure out how to arm ourselves against distraction, that negative part of distraction when we're really trying to move forward on the 99% perspiration. We're really trying to execute on our ideas. How do we avoid distraction

in those moments? And I think that the best way to do it is to understand exactly why we're so vulnerable to these technological distractions and to understand why we find them so addictive. And only once we understand what's driving our behavior can we actually become more conscious about changing it for the better? So I want to quickly talk about the psychology of distraction and addiction through the lens of public enemy number one when it comes to distraction at work, that granddaddy of all distractions, email. And if you don't believe that emails are number one distraction at work, here's some stats. The average office worker spends 28% of their work week managing email, processes 122 messages a day, and checks their email 11 times per hour on average.

And numerous studies have shown that the more we check our email, the more stressed we are at the end of the day and the less happy we are at the end of the day. And most of us know this intuitively, I think. I doubt that anyone listening right now would claim that they enjoy dealing with their inbox every day. And yet that still doesn't stop us from checking our email incessantly. I would bet that most of you probably checked your email either before bed last night or right after you woke up this morning. So what's that about? We can probably all agree that email sucks and it increases our stress. And yet most of us still wake up and choose to start our day by checking our email. So why do we spend so much time doing something that has such a negative impact on our wellbeing? I mean, sure. Part of it is that we have to check email for work, but that's not really the whole story, is it?

The fact of the matter is, even though the content of the emails we receive is frequently a bit of a bummer, frankly, the actual act of checking email, the act itself, is completely addictive. It activates this primal impulse in our brains to seek out rewards. And in this regard, we're actually not very different from rats. So back in the 1930s, psychologist B.F. Skinner invented this device called the operant conditioning chamber, now known as the Skinner box, which he used to test behavioral theories on rats. Skinner wanted to see what effect different kinds of positive reinforcements, like food pellets,

and negative reinforcements, like electric shocks, would have on the animals. So first he experimented with putting the rats on a fixed schedule of behavior reinforcement. If the rat pressed the lever inside the box, it would receive a food pellet. And if it continued pressing the lever, every hundredth time it did so, the rat would receive another pellet. So press the lever a hundred times, get a reward. That was the system. But Skinner also experimented with a variable schedule. So in this scenario, the rat didn't know when the reward was coming. It might have to press the lever 20 times to get a pellet, or it might have to press the lever 200 times to get a pellet. The system was random and the rat could never know exactly

when the reward was coming. Surprisingly, the rats were significantly more motivated when they were on the variable schedule. Skinner found that even if he took away the rewards for the rats on the variable schedule entirely, they would keep working, that is furiously pressing that lever, for an extremely long time before giving up, almost until they would die, and much longer than the rats on the fixed schedule would. And so some of this might actually be starting to sound a little bit familiar to you, perhaps. Because for better or worse, humans respond to random rewards very similarly to rats. And email is a near perfect random reward

system right email basically works exactly like a slot machine most of the time when you press the lever to check your email messages you get something disappointing or bothersome a communication from a frustrated client or boss with an urgent request you really don't want to deal with but every once in a while you press the lever and you get something exciting, an email from a long lost friend or an offer to speak at a conference that you would love to go to. Or, you know, maybe it's an animated gif of Beyonce. Who knows? And it's those random rewards mixed in with all the junk. They're what we find so addictive and they make us want

to push the lever again and again and again and check our email even when we have better things to do. And the same idea extends, of course, to basically all other types of social media that we use, to Facebook, to Instagram, to Twitter, Tinder, or even Slack. And so the question that I think we need to ask ourselves is, do we want random rewards or do we want real rewards? Do we want to spend all day on random rewards on email and Slack and Twitter and then feel sort of stressed out and empty at the end of the day? Or do we want to spend our day on real rewards, on pursuing the creative projects that are really meaningful to us so that we can feel a sense of satisfaction at the end of the day? So I would challenge you, the next time that you reach to check your email out of habit, think about if you're doing it out of necessity to accomplish work that you want and need to get done that's meaningful to you, or if you're checking it out of addiction.

As the writer Annie Dillard says, how we spend our days is how we spend our lives. And I think it's time to spend less time just keeping busy and more time leaving a legacy.